


things you said when you were drunk

by remedialpotions



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Deathly Hallows missing moment, Drinking & Talking, F/M, Injury, Mutual Pining, Shell Cottage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-01
Updated: 2019-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:28:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26104192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remedialpotions/pseuds/remedialpotions
Summary: Ron was just so used to bad news at this point.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley
Comments: 15
Kudos: 50





	things you said when you were drunk

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a long time ago for Tumblr as a "things you said..." prompt, and when someone reblogged it recently I gave it another look and realized I'm really proud of it. So... enjoy!

Ron was just so used to bad news at this point. Already prone to anxiety, his nerves had essentially fried over the past year, and now he simply expected that what could go wrong, would. His family was in hiding. Voldemort had the Elder Wand. Bellatrix had taken Hermione, not him - and though they’d escaped, they had lost Dobby in the process. Bill and Fleur could no longer go to work at Gringotts, couldn’t even leave the bounds of the Fidelius Charm, and with so many houseguests, it was just a matter of time before Shell Cottage ran out of food. The world was ending, and - Harry’s absurd plan notwithstanding - there was so little hope in sight. Most mornings, Ron awoke in a sleeping bag on his brother’s sitting room floor, amazed to still have air in his lungs. 

So when Lupin had burst through the door to the cottage on the twenty-eighth of April, Ron’s stomach had sunk like a stone. Someone was dead, surely, or kidnapped. Or perhaps Hogwarts was on fire, or Voldemort had found them and was on his way. Members of the Order didn’t usually come charging through doors unannounced with good news.

Except… it  _ had  _ been good news. Tonks had had the baby, and she was fine. And the baby was fine. And Lupin was happy. He’d appointed Harry as godfather as though that fight at Grimmauld Place had never happened. As bottles of wine emerged from cupboards, uncorking themselves and patiently waiting to fill goblets, Ron had simply watched the scene unfold from his seat at the kitchen table, relief gushing through him with such strength that his limbs felt weak. 

It was Hermione who handed him a glass, their fingers brushing as he accepted it. 

“Thanks,” he said, smiling up at her. Her eyes met his, and God, it was all he wanted, to touch her, to reach out and pull her into his arms, to kiss her and not care about anything else. 

But that, too, seemed like another thing that would go horribly wrong upon attempt, so he contented himself with a stolen glance at her as she settled into the chair beside him. He was surely still allowed to admire her, wasn’t he, and be grateful that she was still alive, that her muscles were regaining strength with every passing day and that her mind was as razor-sharp as it had always been. At least he had that left. At least he had her at all. 

As Lupin, his audience rapt, told the story of little Teddy’s birth - evidently, Tonks’ hair had been constantly changing color the entire time during her delivery - Hermione extended her legs in front of her, under the table. Her toes brushed against the side of Ron’s ankle, but she didn’t jerk back, and neither did he, and soon she had set the arches of her feet on the tops of his, as though he were some sort of footrest. As though this was a perfectly normal thing for them to be doing. As though they were some sort of couple or something.

Ron took a gulp of red wine and tried to fix his attention back onto Lupin - he really was happy for him - but he was only aware of Hermione. Whenever he was with her, everything else seemed to recede into the background, irrelevant when compared with her. 

He let himself look over at her again. A pretty flush had crept into her cheeks, and a tendril of hair was curling at her temple; Ron had the near-irresistible urge to brush it behind her ear. 

“Hey,” Ron whispered, not wanting to interrupt the very detailed description of Teddy Lupin’s first set of tiny wizarding robes. Hermione turned toward him; her lips were tinged with purple. “How much wine have you had?”

She shrugged, a little spark of mischief in her eyes, then picked up the bottle sitting on the table and upended it into Ron’s glass. The last little splash remaining into the bottle went into her own glass. 

“You’re twice my size,” she whispered back. “You can handle it.”

Actually, he wasn’t sure if he could. He hadn’t eaten much at dinner, thanks to his unending worry over the food supply at Shell Cottage, and the wine had gone right to his head. 

But he thought, for once in his life, that he wouldn’t argue with her. 

“I don’t know about twice your size.” All right, so maybe he’d argue a little. “C’mere, let’s compare.”

He pressed his palm flat against the table, and she immediately aligned her hand on his. This was already better than expected; he thought they’d compare side-by-side, and her skin was pleasantly warm and smooth against his.

“See?” She pressed the tips of her fingers down onto his, just below the first knuckle, and involuntarily Ron hissed. “What? What did I-“

“No, nothing,” he said quickly, but Hermione, unconvinced, took his hand between both of hers to study it. “Seriously, it’s fine-“

“It’s not fine.” She ran the pad of her thumb gently down the length of his middle finger. The abrasions on his knuckles had finally scabbed over, though here and there were bits that remained raw and angry, even weeks later. “Are these scrapes still bothering you?”

“No, no, it’s fine-“

“I wonder if there’s any dittany left-“

“Dittany isn’t going to help,” said Ron before he could stop himself. The wine was definitely kicking in. 

“Then what-“

“Oh, no, no, thank you,” came Lupin’s voice from the end of the table, and Ron saw him politely declining another goblet of wine. “No, I must be getting back, they’ll start to worry-“

And the matter of Ron’s aching hands was dropped, at least for the time being, in favor of seeing Lupin off and helping tidy up the kitchen after the festivities. With Harry roped into a conversation with Bill - and one that didn’t sound terribly fun, from the sound of their voices - Ron and Hermione retreated to the safety of the sitting room, where a fire crackled in the hearth. Emboldened by the wine, and grateful that they were actually alone, Ron found himself sitting much more closely beside Hermione on the sofa than he would have done with anyone else.

“Let me see your hands again,” she demanded, angling toward him so that her knee rested atop his thigh. 

“See?” He held his hands up, palms out. “There they are. All in one piece.”

He actually doubted that last bit, but the wine didn’t have him that far gone yet.

“Mmhmm,” she said skeptically. “Then make a fist right now.”

Looking her directly in the eye in an attempt at defiance, Ron slowly curled the fingers of his right hand toward his palm, only to find that they stopped halfway there, too stiff and swollen to move.

“Ron!” Hermione’s face bore a mixture of half-indignance, half-horror. “What happened?!”

He hadn’t considered it before, but he supposed she wouldn’t know. There had been so much going on in the immediate aftermath of Malfoy Manor, and Ron had been so focused on Hermione’s recovery, that he had hardly given a thought to his own injuries. And looking back, he thought he should have known better than to pound on concrete walls and try wandless Apparition, but he’d lost control of himself. For once in his life, he hadn’t had a strategy. He hadn’t been able to see three, four, five, ten moves in advance. All he’d seen was the girl he loved being dragged away by the hair, and himself, powerless to stop it.

“They’re just sore, is all,” he replied, tipping more wine into his mouth. 

“Sore from what, exactly?”

“Well - it’s not easy planning a bank robbery, is it?” At Hermione’s glare, he relented. “It’s just from - from the Malfoys’.”

“Oh.” Hermione cast her eyes down at the point where their legs overlapped. “I suppose we’ve never really talked about what-“ She swallowed. “What they did when they took you.”

“It’s my fault,” Ron blurted out, regret and guilt bubbling up inside him like acid. “What happened, it’s all my fault.”

Because he hadn’t done enough, hadn’t  _ been _ enough. Because instead of actually using his head and figuring out a way to save Hermione, he’d lost it entirely, pounding on cement walls as if that made any sense, as if he could use the force of his rage to burst through and get to her. Because he had dropped his wand when Bellatrix told him to, instead of fighting. 

Because he’d left.

“No, it isn’t.” Hermione reached for him, her hand hovering millimeters above his, before reconsidering and resting her hand on his arm. Her fingertips brushed over the ligature marks on his wrists, relics from the brief time during which he was bound to Harry in that cellar. “None of it was your fault - if I remember correctly, and I know that I do, Harry was the one who triggered the Taboo, that’s how it all started.”

“But I failed you.” He could barely get the words out. “I should have done more, I - I should have made her take me instead-“

“She was never going to take you,” said Hermione, her voice quiet yet matter-of-fact. “It was always going to be me, because of who I am. What I am.”

“It should have been me.”

Ron didn’t have to look up to know that shock and confusion was registering on Hermione’s face. 

“It should have been  _ no one _ -“

“It should have been me. Out all of us, it should have - I mean, I’m the one who-“

“Don’t.” The force in her voice was enough to make his head snap up. “Don’t you dare say you deserved it. No one deserves to be tortured.”

At his core, he agreed with her: there was not a soul alive, save maybe Voldemort or Bellatrix Lestrange, who deserved an Unforgivable Curse cast upon them. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that it would have been a form of penance, almost, to the friends that he had so deeply wronged all those months ago. He didn’t want to be the one who always got the easier end of the deal, and he definitely didn’t want to be the one using up all of the healing potions when Hermione had been through so much more. 

“I know that,” he relented finally. “Doesn’t mean I don’t still blame myself.”

She gave his forearm a light squeeze. “I forgave you a long time ago, you know. Harry and I both did. I wish you would just forgive yourself.”

Ron felt his head swim, but not from the wine still in his bloodstream. He hadn’t considered that she might fully forgive him, that his worst transgression wouldn’t always be a stain on their friendship. That maybe not all was lost. 

“I s’pose I could give it a go,” he said, corners of his lips twitching. 

“And while you’re doing that, we’re going to do something about those hands of yours,” said Hermione decisively as she stood. “I’m going to get the Skele-Gro.”

“Skele - my bones aren’t  _ missing _ -“

“It has healing properties too.” Shaking her head in exasperation, she strode out of the room, though not before tossing him a smile over her shoulder.

The good things, he thought, were even better when he didn’t expect them.


End file.
